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Shiny New Clients!
How to scale your course/membership with an affiliate program (with Laura Sprinkle, founder of Rootabl)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to Shiny New Clients, the marketing podcast that helps you attract shiny new clients to your business. We'll talk about social media, what makes people buy, how to go viral, and marketing psychology all in 20 minutes or less. Whether you're a coach, a stylist, or a wedding planner, if you've got a service based business to sell, this is the show you need to fill your calendar. I'm Jenna Warner, your new marketing coach and this is Shiny New Clients. One of the biggest projects that I have had on the to do list inside my business is to launch an affiliate program. I have had it on the to do list for months and months, and every time I went to start it, I realized it was a much bigger job than I thought it was. Having an affiliate, a friend here and there, getting a kickback for sending people your way, that's one thing. But did you know that you can go full send with an affiliate program? Your affiliate program can make a huge mark in the revenue your business is bringing in. It can be fun for your members, fun for your clients, fun for strangers. There are so many options if you really want to take it seriously. So I've brought you someone here today who knows how to take things seriously. This is Laura Sprinkle. She's the founder of Rootable, which is actually an affiliate tracking platform. She is an affiliate program strategist, the person you call when you want to launch one of these things for realsies. So today we're going to talk about having an affiliate program, being an affiliate, all things around it, and we'll give you a little bit of context. If you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are those words and what do they mean? Hi, Laura.
- [01:40]
B
Hi, Jenna.
- [01:41]
A
I love that you have this very focused niche and it is something that is so needed with especially people like me. Business owners, program owners, membership owners. How did you find yourself in this corner of things?
- [01:53]
B
Yeah, I mean, I got into the whole world of online courses and everything through a subject matter of my own. So I was in the health space, I wrote a book, I had a course course called She's Got Guts. And within that launch, like, if I had had an affiliate program at that time, I'd probably still be doing that work because I sort of just came to the end of my rope of like, okay, how am I going to get more clients? How am I going to get more people to know about me and my work without needing to, like, get on a content hamster wheel or invest a ton of money in ads? And I'm so grateful that I did not have an affiliate program at that time because then I discovered affiliate programs from there because I was like, okay, I love the marketing and positioning of having a course. I started working with a woman named Selena Su who had a course called Impacting Millions. And she asked. She asked me to be her affiliate manager. I didn't really know what that meant, but I'm like, I'll roll my sleeves up. I'll learn something. And I just fell in love with getting to share offers and services and courses and programs and memberships and products that you love that you don't need to create and then to get paid for it on the back end and to be able to, like, spread wealth within your community rather than like, here, Mark Zuck, have another dollar. I just fell in love with the whole process. So that was my short long story.
- [03:15]
A
I love that you say products that you love because. And I mean, I don't want to get into this bone. I've got to pick. But there's a lot of people out there who sell the idea of making money as an affiliate as your job. And that's not really what I'm talking about. And I don't think that's what you are talking about either. What we're talking about is you take a program, you love the program, you. Your friend asks you about the program, and when you tell your friend about it, you give them a personal link so that you get a kickback if it's right for them. So selling something that you already love and getting a kickback. So instead of, like you said, me paying for an ad to be shown to new people, my people show me to new people, right? Being paid for recommending something you already love to people around you who could use it or who need it.
- [04:03]
B
Yeah, for sure. And I do. We've definitely worked with folks who have courses and programs, but then also get really good revenue by promoting, you know, complimentary courses and programs. So for example, I'm thinking of like, Amy Porterfield and Marie Forleo, right? Marie Forleo has a great program on creating an online business, and Amy Porterfield has a great program on creating a course. And they work really well, hand in hand, and they both can make incredible revenue promoting the other person without needing to have two courses themselves. So. So yes, that can be. I'm going to tell a friend. It can also be, I'm going to create an additional revenue stream for myself, but that's not going to be my entire business. I'm still going to have, you know, or Maybe I don't even have a business. Maybe I'm just an affiliate for things I love and I have a full time job. It could be a side hustle, but it could also be a revenue stream.
- [04:58]
A
Got it. I have some affiliate links scattered throughout. Like I begged later my scheduling software for Instagra to let me be an affiliate because I was already promoting them all over the place and telling everyone to sign up with them. Because as someone who was a social media manager for a long time, I've seen all of the platforms and I knew which ones were good and which ones were hard to use and later was just so intuitive that I asked them multiple times. I was like, in their DMs, I'm emailing them like, can I please have a link? And then eventually they gave me, eventually they let me be in a billion. And then I disclosed that when I tell my clients, I recommend you use later, you don't have to, you can use whatever you want. And if you do and you use this link, I get, you know, six bucks a month or something.
- [05:43]
B
Which sounds like not a lot, but that can add up if you're recommending a lot of people.
- [05:47]
A
Yeah. I am so lucky that the people inside my program Magic marketing machine love it. Like we have a lot of like huge fans and it was the same thing with them. They were asking us, I have a friend that wants to join. Do you have any affiliate stuff set up? And then we get into the tech of it all. Which is the tech of it all.
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B
Yes.
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A
Which is frustrating. And that's kind of where rootable came in because I imagine you saw some holes in the market because there wasn't a lot of good tech that makes this super easy and intuitive.
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B
Exactly. Yeah. And in particular for folks in our industry. So course creators, membership creators, digital, digital creators of that flavor. Like there are products that are out there for, for software companies. There are products that are out there for, you know, big, big corporations, you know, big E commerce. But I didn't see anything that was like really well made and gave your customers the ability to have transparency into the process. And that's why we really wanted to.
- [06:48]
A
Create Brutable from the user's perspective, from the affiliate's perspective. How is it different than the other platforms?
- [06:55]
B
Yeah. And then I. And there was a third, a third category I didn't mention also. So a lot of times people in our industry will use, you know, a shopping car like Kajabi or a thrivecart or a Sam cart, and it's more of an Add on. It's just like sort of an afterthought, like, oh, and then we also kind of do affiliate stuff on the side. So logging into those platforms as an affiliate is tricky. Once you log in when you're in the back end, like, you can't really see that much information. Right. Like, you might be able to grab a link. There's probably limited link capabilities, but you might be able to grab a link. You might be able to see how many clicks your link has gotten and you can probably see how much you've earned in commission. Yeah. As an affiliate manager, one of the things that I always recommended was to just provide more information to your affiliates so that they can do a better job. So one of the things that we do is we can track leads as well as sales. So, like, if you have a free webinar and actually how do you sell a webinar?
- [07:55]
A
Yeah, my affiliates got the link to enroll. But probably what's going to be more likely is they use the link to the webinar so I can sell for them and they don't have to do any work.
- [08:05]
B
Exactly. Well, and they can. You can sell for them. But it also is so much easier to tell your friend, I think you're going to love Jenna. I think you're going to love her style. But go do this free class. Go watch this free webinar with her. Make sure it's the right fit for you. Learn something. Right. Because I'm sure you're providing so much value within that webinar. And so it's easy to say, oh, go ahead for this free thing. And then with rootable, they can actually see who's taken them up on that offer. Right. If I'm promoting on social, I've taken your program, so I'm like, all about my socials. I've got it down and I'm promoting this free opportunity with you. I can go into the backend in routable. I can see, oh, I've got these 50 emails of folks who have actually signed up for the webinar. I can follow up with them. I can say, hey, what did you think? Do you have any questions about it? I'm an alumni, so I'd love to, you know, make sure it's the right fit for you. You know, you can be this helpful friend as they're going along in the process, they make more sales, which means you make more sales. So it's just like a win, win, win all around.
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A
That's way better already. I could see that, having so much Value.
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B
And then they can also like when they see the emails for maybe they say like, oh, when you sign up for the webinar, I'll throw in, you know, a template for you or something. They can add bonuses, they can email them. Here you go. When they buy, they can see their information. There's just all these like little tips that I had as an affiliate manager that. So I had an agency at one point and it was so expensive to run because there was not the software solution to like cut down on that team time, you know, because we were like doing all that stuff manually. It was like, okay, let's like finagle a tech setup to do this back end zap. And then, oh, it was so much copying and pasting. But now it just like lives in rootable.
- [09:59]
A
Another thing that I did for my people is I created a mini course called how to make money as an MMM affiliate. And it explains all the tech in a very friendly way. Like me on camera. I painted a, painted a watercolor cookie and I like hold up my little watercolor cookie painting, like this is a cookie and explain the whole thing. Because I know when I was an affiliate for other people, which I never took super seriously, but occasionally I would get like a link for programs or whatever. It was so intimidating, the interface. I'm like, can somebody just explain this to me? Like, I'm five and scared. And so we created this mini course to show them, here's how the tech works, here are some hang ups that you might experience and it's okay. And then here's all of our materials. Because the other thing you want to do with your affiliates, Laura, you know this listener is give them materials, swipe, copy email templates, ideas for their Instagram story, hold their hands and make it easy for them to support you. If you're ever trying to get someone to do something, tell them what's in it for them and make it as easy as possible for them to help.
- [11:07]
B
Yeah, exactly. And that could be, you know, from, from the biggest things to the smallest things, right? Like if you're saying, hey, you know, we have a client who has a, an incredible mental game training program for teenage female athletes. It's so specific and I love it. And so it's like a lot of their referrals come from like mom, moms in the stands, right? And so it's as simple as like have a little script for like when you're talking to a mom in a stand. And even if they're not gonna verbatim, they're not gonna like pull up their phone and like use that script, but it is that reminder to them, oh, hey, actually we're in this program and I think it'd be really great for your daughter too because it's really helped mine to just have that quick reminder in there. So like, it just if there's something you want your affiliates to do, what is something you can provide to make that super duper simple. So I love that you brought that up.
- [12:02]
A
Oh, awesome. Do you have any other, like, must do, do not pass go have to haves for the person who is running.
- [12:09]
B
The affiliate program, I would say the other thing that comes to mind is just to test everything ahead of time. So often when it comes to any type of data, I mean, this is true whether you're running an affiliate program or not. But like every time I've ever done a debrief, you know, postmortem after a launch or after a big campaign or something, it's like every time we're like, oh, test earlier, you may think you've set up everything correctly, but it's like once affiliates start promoting, like you want to make sure that all the scripts are on the right pages, everything is tested and tracking, and then also just communicate more than you think you should. It's the same thing for when you're making sales, right? Like when you send more emails, when you make more posts, you're going to make more money. The same is true for communicating with your affiliates and reminding them of that. So something that I like to do and encourage all of our clients to do and this does not have to be the CEO, right? Like if you do have a VA or something, especially when you've got a larger pool of affiliates, like more than 10, I would recommend having a part time VA or something to support. They can be going in and looking at the data and saying, you know, every day, like a quick list of like five people. They could put two people that have done something awesome that day and three people that like maybe haven't promoted yet. Because I will also say if you're like, oh my gosh, I've invited, you know, 50 people to be my affiliate and you know, only 10 of them have promoted. Like, that's okay. Like you, you can still reach out to the other 40 people and it's super duper common. So I call it my like amplification checklist. So your team every day could say, hey Jenna, here are two people you could vox and be like, oh my gosh, loved your last email, or thank you so much. Or like, oh, I saw you shot up the leaderboard. And then three people that's like, hey, just checking in. Can my team help you with anything? We're here. If you. You know, we've got templates. There's still time to promote. So it takes you, what, like, 10 minutes to do those quick boxers, but it makes you kind of have this, like, omnipresent vibe where your people are like, oh, my God, Jenna's paying attention to my promo, and it's very cool.
- [14:22]
A
This might be getting into the weeds a little bit, but what would you say to the person who's like, I want to do this. I see the potential. I could be making money as an affiliate for this thing that I already like. But it feels weird to pitch to my list or my followers something that is not what I'm normally selling.
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B
Hmm. So this is for people who already have an existing product and an existing business.
- [14:50]
A
Yeah. Yeah. Because that's something that I. I know that as someone who teaches people Instagram, I know that sometimes finding the thread, even when people are selling their own thing, finding the thread to talk about it and feeling like everyone is staring at them and them selling anything is weird. So when I was trying to think of roadblocks my people might have, that was one of them. They're used to selling one thing. How do they relate that and, like, blast out to their list a different topic?
- [15:20]
B
Hmm. I love this question. I'm gonna answer two different questions, one of which you didn't ask. Selling somebody else's product can actually be a lot easier than selling your own in a lot of cases. So I find that times when people are nervous about selling their own thing, actually being an affiliate for somebody else first can be really helpful. Cause you're only focused on marketing and sales instead of like, oh, my gosh, now I have to go deliver this thing and create the course and talk about myself. Right. It's a lot. It's actually a lot easier to talk about somebody else. I can be like, jenna is so amazing. She is brilliant at Instagram. Like, go check out her stuff. Like, I could talk about that all day. And then we turn it around to ourselves, and it's like, oh, like, you know, I'm awesome. It just, like, it has a different vibe.
- [16:08]
A
100% same with selling something for free. I always start my people that are nervous to sell by giving away a freebie and, like, selling the heck out of a freebie of some sort, a masterclass PDF or whatever, just to get the reps in and get the practice promoting without the mindset locks.
- [16:22]
B
Totally. I think that's one. One element of it is getting the reps in, practicing just talking at people you love. And then with that, like, if you're worried about sort of the messaging or not worried, but if you're like, okay, I always talk about Instagram, how am I gonna now talk about Facebook? Maybe even, maybe even some of your marketing related to Instagram is how you don't need Facebook as an example of like worried about that type of messaging. Anytime you're promoting anything, really and you're thinking about the thread, I would just go back to, what are the true stories that I can share about the creator, the person who created the product, about the company, about the brand, about the actual product? What are the true stories that I have to share about this thing? If it's okay. I'm normally talking about affiliate programs, and now all of a sudden I'm going to promote a product that. Talking about ads, I would just think about, okay, what are the true stories I know about ads or about the person who created that product? Oh, I met this person at an event. They seem so warm and genuine. We were talking about ad costs and how it's bad and that's bad. You know, that's why people come to me for affiliates. But that's also why they go to her, because she can, you know, work out this ad magic to help people run ads. So just like, always come back to the true stories that you have. And then, and then you're gonna good, and they're going to feel good and it's just going to feel good all around. That's really. That's a good answer.
- [17:49]
A
That's so true. Like, I got an email the other day from someone that was like, hey, my. Like, I don't even know what she sells. I think she's a business coach and she's like, my friend gives away this freebie and it's an email template that's really good here. And it was probably an affiliate link, but I was like, I want that freebie. Thank you for the freebie. You know, it made perfect sense.
- [18:09]
B
Totally. I think too, people aren't paying that much attention. They're not going to be like, oh, my gosh, this person never talks about this thing. Why are they sharing it? It's like if you're, if you're sharing from the heart and telling stories about your life and your marketing and in your social content, like, you talking about this other thing that you're using it's just going to be a value add. Something completely like values misaligned, then that's a different story. And you might want to ask yourself why you're promoting that thing, you know.
- [18:39]
A
And I, but I can hear it, I can hear somebody going like, yeah, well, I'm a Reiki practitioner and how am I supposed to sell Jenna's Instagram marketing course? I'm like, a Reiki practitioner is like one of our biggest affiliates, you know, because people want to learn Reiki and then create a Reiki business. Or maybe you're like a dog walker. But a lot of people have noticed that you've stepped it up on Instagram and they want to know how you did it. And there are business owners out there who follow you. So that can be the thread, like, maybe you came into. You know what I mean? Like, I, I can come up with a million ideas for people, but that's kind of my whole thing is ideas.
- [19:16]
B
And that was probably the thing that had me fall in love the most with affiliate stuff was I hopped on a hundred strategy calls with affiliates in a three month period. So a hundred strategy calls over and over and over again. And it was in particular for Selena Sue's Impacting Millions course. So this is a course about how to get publicity for your business. I don't, I don't think it exists anymore, but it was really fabulous. And one of her biggest affiliates was a children's book author. Like, that made no sense on paper, right? She sells children's books. Her audience are parents of kids. But what she did was personal outreach. She was in masterminds related to business, related to growing her book business. And so she used personal outreach and she was on the leaderboard every time.
- [20:03]
A
Amazing. Laura, thank you for letting me, like, talk to you while brainstorming. Because like I said, I'm in the thick of all this right now. And so as you talk, I'm just like coming up with ideas. I'm like, oh, thank God you're here. This is perfect timing. So what position should somebody be in to reach out to you? Like, who do you help? Right now?
- [20:22]
B
I'd say you're ready for an affiliate program once you already have an existing product. So if you have a course, it's already made, if you've got your membership, it's already going and you already have a way that you know, know you can sell it, right? So if you already have the webinar, if you already have a system for getting sales calls, because affiliates don't make something work. Affiliates add fuel to a fire that's already lit, right? It's like you don't want to, you know I'm gonna use I don't even know how to build fire really clearly you don't wanna pour kerosene just on some twigs and be like where is the fire? It's like if you've already got the fire started and then you can pour that on then that's gonna be better for everybody, better for your relationships, better for your sales. You don't need to have, you know, made a million dollars already but I would say, you know like have a validated product and have a validated way of selling that product and then affiliates are just going to be able to give you more eyeballs again.
- [21:23]
A
Laura is the founder of Rootable. Her program is called Rock, your affiliate program. I will link everything down in the show notes, all the thanks, thank you so much for being all the things.
- [21:33]
B
Thank you.